I have never been so relieved to see a set of wind turbines in my life. After six hours of driving from Aalborg Airport, a wrong turn somewhere near Nibe that took me past what felt like every single sugar beet field in Denmark, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted I drive into a fjord, I finally spotted the cluster of white blades turning lazily above the treeline. Vadum Strand. I had arrived.

The mishap, though. I must confess. In my wisdom, and by wisdom I mean sheer panic at having missed lunch by about four hours, I had stopped at a petrol station near Fjerritslev and purchased what I believed to be a Danish pastry. The label said "spandauer." I thought, brilliant, a local delicacy. I bit into it while navigating a roundabout. It was not a spandauer. It was a hot dog in a pastry case. A polsehorn. I had committed the cardinal sin of the hungry traveller: eating a sausage roll without knowing it was a sausage roll. The expression on my face, I am told by the rear-view mirror, was one of profound spiritual confusion. I still think about it. The pastry was excellent, mind. But the betrayal lives with me.

Pulling up to the house at Vadum Strand, I was too busy digesting my meat-based surprise to properly appreciate the place. It took a cup of tea and a sit-down on the decking before it sank in. The light up here is different. Sharper, somehow. The house sat among low dunes with the Kattegat glinting through the marram grass, and everything smelled of salt and pine and something faintly agricultural that I later learned was a nearby pig farm. You cannot have everything.

I had grand plans for self-catering. The kitchen looked sensible enough, all clean lines and a hob that actually worked, unlike the temperamental beast I have at home. My first evening, I attempted to honour my surroundings by cooking something authentically Danish. I had bought a lump of smoked fish from a supermarket in Brovst, reasoning that North Jutland plus coastline equals herring expertise. I was not wrong about the region. I was wrong about my ability to identify herring. What I had purchased was mackerel. Very smoked mackerel. I flaked it into a risotto with the confidence of a man who has watched too many cooking programmes. The result was edible in the way that hospital food is edible. I ate it on the decking, watching the light fade, and made a mental note that humility is best served with white wine.

The next morning, properly hungry and chastened, I found the local baker in Vadum itself. A proper one, with a queue of pensioners and a smell that made my knees weak. I pointed at things. This is my preferred method abroad. I acquired a tebirkes, which is a poppy seed affair of such buttery magnificence that I ate two standing in the car park, flakes dropping onto my shoes like edible snow. I also bought a frosnapper, which I later learned means "frog snapper" and contains no frog whatsoever, just more butter and remonce and a twist of pastry that defies physics.

Cooking at the house became my daily theatre of small failures and occasional triumphs. I discovered that the local Brugsen supermarket in Brovst stocks something called "spegepolse," a dried sausage that I sliced obsessively for every meal until my fingers smelled permanently of garlic and smoke. I attempted rodgrod med flode on a rainy afternoon, having found redcurrants at a roadside honesty stall. The stall had no one attending it, just a jam jar for money and a note saying "tak." I loved Denmark intensely in that moment. The pudding was lumpy. My pronunciation of its name was worse. I ate it with the last of the cream, feeling like a fraud but a well-fed one.

The pubs, though. That was where I found my rhythm. There is a place in Strandby, barely ten minutes up the coast, called something unpronounceable that I referred to as "the harbour one." It had fishing nets on the wall and a bartender who spoke English like he was doing me a personal favour. I ate fried plaice there, caught that morning, with new potatoes and a parsley sauce that I would happily bathe in. The beer was Tuborg, because of course it was, and it tasted of relief and accomplishment. I went back twice. The second time, I tried to order in Danish. The bartender responded in English with such gentle speed that I knew I had massacred his language. We did not speak of it. We did not need to.

Back at Vadum Strand, I settled into a routine of market mornings and long lunches. The fish market in Strandby harbour on Wednesdays became my pilgrimage. I bought shrimp, still twitching, and boiled them in the big kitchen pot with dill I had nicked from a neighbour's garden. I do not know if it was their garden. It was a patch of green near the dunes. I am not proud. The shrimp were sweet and firm and perfect with rye bread and butter, eaten with my fingers while standing at the kitchen window, watching a heron stalk the shoreline.

One evening, defeated by my own ambition, I simply fried eggs and laid them on top of leftover boiled potatoes with the last of the spegepolse. It was the best meal of the holiday. I have thought about it since. The simplicity of it, the salt, the runny yolk mixing with butter and potato. Sometimes the finest dining is admitting you are not a chef and never will be.

On my final morning, I walked to the baker one last time. The same queue of pensioners. The same impossible choice. I bought a kringle to take home, knowing full well it would not survive the journey intact. It did not. I ate half in the ferry queue at Hirtshals, crumbs down my front, no regrets whatsoever.

I left Vadum Strand with a heavier waistline and a lighter heart, which feels like the correct balance for any decent holiday. The mackerel risotto still haunts me, but gently, like a familiar ghost. The sausage roll surprise less so. Some betrayals, you simply learn to live with.